"The faux wall is part of a “Bethlehem Unwrapped” Christmas festival produced in association with an assortment of NGOs that are one-sided and dogmatic in their hostility toward Israel."

In the courtyard of St. James Church in Piccadilly, London, stands a replica of
Israel’s West Bank security barrier so colossal it almost blocks the church
itself.

The faux wall is part of a “Bethlehem Unwrapped” Christmas
festival produced in association with an assortment of NGOs that are one-sided
and dogmatic in their hostility toward Israel.

Misrepresenting Israel’s
security barrier, the festival overlooks the reason it was built in the first
place: to stop suicide terrorists attacking civilians in Israel. It also ignores
the precipitous decline in terror attacks following the barrier’s
construction.

The festival features anti-Israel campaigners including
comedians Jeremy Hardy and Ivor Dembina débuting the film Jeremy Hardy vs. the
Israeli Army and the “Stand Up Against the Wall” comedy show. There’s also
performances by musician Nigel Kennedy, columnists Mark Steel and Yasmin
Alibhai-Brown, War On Want’s poet Rafeef Ziadah, and Jeff Halper of Israeli
Committee Against House Demolitions, who once said, “I think it is impossible to
have a Jewish state.”

A search of the church’s website shows that
regarding some of the most horrendous human rights violations in the Middle
East, St. James has little or nothing to say. The 5,000 Syrians killed monthly
in a civil war where the number of fleeing refugees has not been paralleled
since the Rwandan genocide? No condemnation. Not even the chemical attack in
August that killed hundreds of Syrian civilians could bring St. James to find
moral indignation.

The epidemic of “honor killings” of women in Turkey,
Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and Lebanon? St. James is
mute. The persecution of Christians in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Gaza? More
silence.

Instead, St. James chose to advance its “human rights agenda” by
dedicating the Christmas season to this Bethlehem Unwrapped event, co-produced
with a coterie of organizations that are dogmatically biased against
Israel.

ICAHD, War on Want, Amos Trust and Holy Land Trust are all strong
proponents of anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns.
Their rhetoric includes demonizing portrayals of Israel as an “apartheid” or
“racist” state, which is part of the ongoing efforts to strip Israel of
international legitimacy. Another co-producer, Interpal, is listed by the US
Department of Treasury as being subject to Executive Order 13224, “blocking
property and prohibiting transactions with persons who commit, threaten to
commit, or support terrorism.”

How can a church be associated with such
groups and still claim a moral high ground? “All net proceeds” will be “donated
to Amos Trust’s ‘Future Peacemakers’ Appeal, supporting the ‘non-violence
training program’ of the Holy Land Trust (HLT) in Bethlehem.”

This sounds
positive, until one looks a little further. Sami Awad, HLT’s executive director
and founder, has stated that non-violence is “not a substitute for the armed
struggle.”

This term, “armed struggle,” is a euphemism used by
Palestinian terror groups and their supporters for murderous attacks on Israeli
civilians.

How much money was spent to create this pillory-Israel
festival? St. James does not say.

However, Bethlehem Unwrapped should be
placed within the much larger context of how this alliance of churches,
Christian aid societies, and faith-based NGOs are promoting blatantly hostile
political campaigns against Israel.

Taxpayer money, mostly European, is
disbursed through the funding mechanisms of each country’s international aid
framework.

In turn, these government agencies allocate grants to various
Christian aid societies, which then distribute funds to a broad range of
humanitarian projects. In the Israeli-Palestinian sphere, however, they often
transfer funds to highly politicized NGOs, many of which exploit moral
principles for immoral objectives.

The BDS movement long recognized the
value of co-opting churches to amplify and legitimize their radical anti-Israel
message.

Their website declares, “Religious institutions are seen in many
communities as embodying important moral and ethical principles... Not only will
successful divestment campaigns [in the churches] financially weaken the
Occupation, but they will raise both the public profile and legitimacy of the
BDS campaign.”

This Bethlehem Unwrapped festival is the latest
manifestation of the process by which churches have been conscripted by
anti-Israel activists to further their agenda, singling out the nation-state of
the Jewish people in a manner that makes a mockery of universal human rights
principles. As a result, St. James has also set back the historic
Christian-Jewish post-Holocaust rapprochement.

St. James Church and its
associated NGOs may see themselves as peacemakers. Paradoxically, HLT’s Sami
Awad said it best: “The most unhelpful thing you can do is be pro one side; it
just adds to the conflict.” Awad’s statement is found, without irony, on the
homepage of this exceptionally one-sided festival’s website.

In all
respects, the St. James festival is a failure and has indeed added to the
conflict.

These moral failures suggest that those who are responsible
should focus on their own need for soul-searching before preaching to
others.

The author is a 2013-2014 Research Fellow for the BDS in the Pews
Project at NGO Monitor in Jerusalem.

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